Hello.
I have about a years experience using Drupal now on a college newspaper site...we have pretty much 'mastered' the basics for the site and are now looking at moving into some more dynamic, engaging content on the site.
One of these types of content is 'photo essays'. What I mean by this term is a content type that would show a collection of related photos for a single headline. For example, when a sports game is held on campus we would like the ability to show several photos from the game instead of writing an article. Also, we would like the ability to add a description for each image.
I am thinking of creating something from scratch using CCK, Taxonomy, Views, and Lightbox...
Does anyone have experience creating a content type similar to the one we are trying to create? Or integrating one into a site already configured for articles?
Thanks for any suggestions/insight.
Happy New Year's, as well!
Comments
Lots to choose from...
This is a common need within the Drupal community - a quick search produced: http://drupal.org/node/418616. I'm a fan of: http://drupal.org/project/fancy_slide
Thanks DeeZone! I am already
Thanks DeeZone!
I am already using Views Slideshow for a front page article rotator...what I am most interested in founding now though is something that is easy to create for the editors.
Like you would goto Create Content > Photo Essay and from there would be able to upload all images for the essay as well as provide descriptions for each.
Just like you said
Use CCK, Filefield, Imagefield, ImageAPI, Imagecache, and Thickbox --
Create your "Photo Essay" content type, and add an imagefield. Set your imagefield to allow multiple file uloads. Using Imagecache, set the size you want the images scaled to.
Then, use Thickbox to display them -- this will require some theming to get different numbers of images to display cleanly (and you might want to use views slideshow to display all the images attached to the node) but that would get things started.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
You're the master!
We use Panels (http://drupal.org/project/panels) and form over rides (http://api.drupal.org/api/function/hook_form_FORM_ID_alter/6) to adjust the admin interface for the editor and writer roles. Removing confusing clutter (revisions, author details, etc) and providing a layout with text descriptions visual queues in an intutitive way will achieve what you're looking for. Bottom line, there's no one magic button or module that cleans everything up. This is Drupal, it gives you the power to do anything... including "make" your site easy to use. Of course this is not out of the box!
One Actual Solution
http://cornellsun.com/features/slideshow/2009/12/24/msg-holiday-festival...
Is this what you had in mind?
I'm not as familiar with the architecture behind this part of our site, but taking a brief glance, it looks like we're not handling image uploads in the node edit form. Our slideshow node type has a field where one puts in a relative path. This path points to a directory where the photos, captions, etc., are uploaded in some sort of pre-defined format.
There's probably some ways we could improve this, but it's working for us right now and there's always more tasks to do than one has time for.
And out of curiosity, what college newspaper is this?
Lullabot
You should check http://www.lullabot.com/articles/photo-galleries-views-attach, in the context of grouping images.
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
The Newspaper
Thanks Mike for the link to the Cornell Daily Sun. This is the type of solution I am looking for...do you have any more details on the way the slideshows work?
The site I am working on is for Mercyhurst College's weekly Merciad (http://merciad.mercyhurst.edu).
A Closer Look
You should add your newspaper to the list of media sites using Drupal (http://groups.drupal.org/node/5100).
Anyway, after doing some more digging, it looks like we're relying Soundslides to do most of the heavy lifting for us. The rest is mostly writing a wrapper around this logic. We have some custom theming logic for slideshow content (page-nodetype-content_slideshow.tpl.php, node-content_slideshow.tpl.php) that creates the nice-looking page to go with the slideshow. The Slideshow node type mostly points to the slideshow content and includes a few other things (e.g.: a thumbnail image used to preview the slideshow on the front page).
Synchronizing ads with Image Galleries
Just to extend the discussion a bit: Does anybody have any ideas (or scipts) on synchronizing ads with JavaScript image galleries?
We have implemented a gallery, but the request has come down to rotate adverts each time a user clicks to display a different image.
I have found the JavaScript file of another site that synchs the rotation of images with their DoublClick server and we might look at that to engineer our own (we use Google Ad Manager).
But, if anybody else has done this and has suggestions, I'm all ears.